An open letter to Charlie Hebdo and all the rest of you
fucking Charlies
Dear Charlies,
Some things people are probably real fucking tired of:
They are tired of smiling at you
They are tired of shaking hands with you
They are tired of fucking talking to you
They are tired of being fucking nice with you
Because this is 2015 and you act like racism and systemic
oppression are new, unheard of, imaginary, or inconsequential. You act like
there is not a long and brutal history of their oppression, at your hands. You call
them savages, when, in the bitterest irony, your history of violent torture-murder
campaigns against these people can only, with any modicum of honesty, be classified
as howling savage barbarity. You insulate yourselves from any real criticism,
minds constantly working like digestive systems to filter out any speck, any
element of truth which might upset your fragile worldview. You are ignorant of
the history of your own oppressive actions and when this history is pointed out
to you, you again act as though history has no relevance. And then, when from
out of the cinders and black smoke you left in your wake, a boogeyman arises
who claps you the fuck up, you have the nerve to act surprised.
Fuck Charlie Hebdo and fuck every one of you Charlies.
Charlie Hebdo is a racist publication. That’s what it is,
let’s not pretend that they were anything more than that, just because they,
like all curmudgeonly racist publications, were also mad about other shit. Let’s
not pretend that there’s some haughty French sophistication that elevated them
out of shit-stinking racism. Yes, comparing the kidnapped sex slave girls of
Boko Haram to welfare queens is satire, it’s fucking racist satire. That it’s
satire doesn’t erase the racism. You sitting around posting “je susis charlie”
is no fucking different from you posting “je susis David Duke” except that
Charlie Hebdo is a weekly magazine and I imagine Duke prints his white power
news bulletins at the end of the month so as to cause less conflict with his
annual neo-nazi bake sale and interracial porn swap party.
"W-w-w-wait a m-m-minute now, it's not racism uh uh because satire" you stutter out like Jimmy Stewart on prescription grade obtuseness.
Satirical racism still employs racism. If you ironically call me a nigger, you've still just called me a nigger.
If you call me nigger as a means of making fun of someone else for calling me a nigger, you've still called me a fucking nigger. This is where your intent falls apart. Because it doesn't matter what you mean in your heart or whatever, it matters that you still employed racist bigoted methodology as means of making your point. You don't get a free pass on that, you don't get to be racist with impunity simply because you actually meant well.
"I don't mean it like that man" is the defense you're trying to mount here and if you truly don't mean it, then stop fucking saying it like that.
Charlie Hebdo creates racist islamophobic shit. There are infinite other means available to them of making their points, but they choose to use the most denigrating. In doing so they became no different than their alleged targets. They actively added to the vast wealth of racist depictions and in doing so they tangibly made these people's lives worse.
This is where you'll inevitably start to condescend. "You don't understand satire" is the response your brain will form like a shit to drop from your lips. People understand satire just fine, it's you who possesses a superficial understanding of racism.
Because your white voice doesn't belong everywhere. Your white voice is not needed everywhere. Your white voice is not wanted everywhere. Your white voice is wholly fucking inappropriate in many arenas. A bunch of insulated white men punching everywhere still results in privileged white people punching the already oppressed. Simply stated, YOU had no fucking business making that particular satire. This is like donning black-face as a means of protesting black-face and then getting indignant when people rightly tell you to get the fuck out of black-face you fucking asshole. Then you come with the most lame-brained "my racism isn't racist" hot takes.
“B-b-b-but awhatabouta-ah-ah-ah we gotta be able to uh-uh commit
sacrilege and-ah-ah offend people b-becau-“
Shut your fucktoothed moral-halitosis stankbank you
insufferable cock drip. That is semantically indistinguishable from the post
9/11 “They hate us 4 r freedoms” bullshit. This is the apotheosis of white whine. The
people in this world who truly hate you for your freedom constitute such a
miniscule portion of the population that they can be ruled damn near
non-existent and absolutely aberrant, characteristic only of the fact that
there have been and always will exist assholes in every society.
This is not to say that growing extremism isn’t a thing. It
is. And it is a matter of savagery; it’s a matter of your savagery. You are
creating these people. Extremism is growing because of your fucking deplorable
actions. If you want to decrease extremism, stop fucking with other people’s
countries, stop oppressing these people in your own nation, stop mocking them as they stand in the rubble of the shit you destroyed, and I guaran-fucking-tee
you, you will see a decline in fucking extremism.
Let me put this in bold so I don’t have to repeat it.
THIS IS NOT SAYING
THAT MOST MUSLIMS SECRETLY APPLAUD WHAT HAPPENED. THIS IS ABOUT EXTREMISM. THE
VAST OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF MUSLIMS ABHOR THESE PEOPLE.
But if we’re going to talk about extremism then let’s talk
about it clearly and honestly. I could have aptly titled this article “How to
tell a true terrorist ghost story” and it would simply go:
First you take a people’s homes and then you destroy those
homes in war; when they are driven to your nation your response is “go back to
the rubble we left you”; mandate that schools teach a positive view of the
colonialist horror you perpetrated on them; pass all measure of denigrating laws
against them and then mock them to their faces. Now you’re the monster of the story.
Then one day, after all the devastation you’ve left, something comes
back from the past, something all howling vengeance and teeth and force. While
you’re sleeping it grips you in some of your most tender places and its teeth
sink in and start to tear flesh.
And the truth then is not that these gunmen simply killed 12
people because they hated the freedom of press and expression. The truth is
that some people from a group you have stepped on, kicked, beaten, raped,
pissed on, murdered, and all but outlawed the very existence of, got pissed off
with your mockery and given everything else that’s happened, given that they’ve
been screaming for you to listen to them for decades now, they learned that
with you, talk don’t mean shit, so they gave you a black-eye. And then you
flood the streets crying about how awful it is.
Yes, it’s awful that 12 people had their lives taken from
them. These are their names.
Frederic Boisseau
Stéphane Charbonnier
Jean Cabut
Philippe Honoré
Bernard Verlhac
Georges Wolinski
Bernard Maris
Michel Renaud
Elsa Cayat
Mustapha Ourrad
Ahmed Merabet
Franck Brinsolaro
Remember them. Remember that they had their lives taken.
They were human beings. They were co-owners and agents of a
barbaric racist oppressive system. Neither of those statements diminishes the
other.
I’m gonna pause here to point something out to you. The
first name on that list is Frederic Boisseau. I put him there first because Frederic
Boisseau was the maintenance man and it was his first day of work in that building.
He left behind two children, aged 10 and 12.
I mourn the loss of human life. I don’t believe in collateral
damage, every life matters. The taking of any life is tragic. The taking of
Frederic Boisseau’s life is tragic. Made all the more so because he wasn’t even
part of this shit.
But make no mistake, this is what happens when you try to
eradicate a people through colonialist atrocity. Because you switched tactics
from militarism to mercantilism doesn’t mean the entirety of the enterprise isn’t
still colonialist in nature. People resist that shit. And eventually after so
much time and so much talking, pleading, begging, urging, screaming, eventually
some people stop talking all together and you all start to look like righteous
targets for revolutionary action. These people burned Paris trying to get that message across to you and you still didn't listen.
That’s not something I condone. That’s something I
desperately want to avoid. But let’s not pretend that it comes from any other
place than furious people who are sick and fucking tired of not having a
goddamn voice.
And while you rev up your nasal white whine machine to tell
me about the right to offend, let me stop and break it down for you like a
package real quick.
You have a shallow understanding offense. You have a voice.
Part of that voice is Charlie Hebdo. And that voice allows you to strike back,
strike out, at all those things which you take offense to, even when what you
take offense to is another people’s existence. You have a voice and that voice
can inflict real damage.
Being offended as a white cartoonist with immediate access to 45,000 voices is a far fucking position from being oppressed, offended, and voiceless. What you call being a offended is really just you having your feelings hurt. You might feel a little spicy about some of the things Charlie Hebdo printed, but the actual impact on your life is nil.
These people are taking offense in the word's root definition.Offense,
from the Latin Offendere literally:
to strike against. Charlie Hebdo printed shit that actively made their lives worse. It pushed/gained support for anti-Islamic legislation, it increased the level of already rampant Islamophobia. These people are striking out against you and your
colonialist supremacism, only they don’t have the voice you have so recently some of them picked
up guns to make their voices louder.
Again, I don’t condone that. But it’s absolutely
understandable how they arrived at that point. Because here’s another thing
that people are fucking sick and tired of: you thinking that they’re too stupid
to know that you’re being racist. It’s not veiled Islamophobia, it’s just Islamophobia. They can see it, and so can everyone else.
People are sick and tired of you acting like you own the
goddamn world. People are sick and tired of you thinking that they’re inferior
and don’t have a right to exist. People are sick and fucking tired of you being
surprised when someone hauls off and slaps the ever living piss out of you for attempting
to enforce such toxic beliefs.
But hey, we’re all entitled to our offensive views. Dope, I
agree. Truly I do, because here’s mine.
Minus Frederic Boisseau, and possibly the two cops,
depending on whether or not they were previously out nightsticking (or whatever
the fuck the French word for truncheon is) some poor or poor person of color,
those shot up bastards got what they had coming to them. That’s not to say they
deserved it, but they are equally responsible for creating the monster that ate
them, and if it wasn’t those specific gunmen, it was gonna be somebody else out
here that was sick of their shit.
Again, I’m not condoning or promoting that action. I am
saying you are ultimately responsible for this shit. When you go around the
world and kick down people’s doors and break all their shit and punch their wives
and rape their kids and piss on the dog on your way out, eventually you will
meet people who have something to say about it, only they won’t be interested
in just saying it anymore.
Actions are the loudest voice any of us have, and your
actions clearly say “je susis Charlie” or “I’m a fucking barbaric racist.”
People are fucking sick and tired of you Charlie.
